This application relates to selling and distributing on-line content, and more particularly, to selling and distributing content such as songs, videos, and text using micropayment schemes.
Various subscription-based approaches have been used to distribute content on the Internet. With a subscription-based approach, a customer may pay a monthly fee for a service that provides access to a library of on-line content such as downloadable songs. Although the monthly fee may be relatively modest, the fee and the effort involved in subscribing to the service may deter casual or occasional users. Moreover, because of fragmentation in the content industry, users who desire to purchase content are often faced with subscribing to numerous different services, which further increases the burden on the user.
Micropayment schemes have been proposed in which on-line users are billed on a per-item basis for each separate item of content that is downloaded.
It is an object of the present invention to provide improved micropayment arrangements for distributing on-line content.